When Bloomberg reported that Spotify would be upping the cost of its premium subscription from $9.99 to $10.99, and including 15 hours of audiobooks per month in the U.S., the change sounded like a win for songwriters and publishers. Higher subscription prices typically equate to a bump in U.S. mechanical royalties — but not this time.
By adding audiobooks into Spotify’s premium tier, the streaming service now claims it qualifies to pay a discounted “bundle” rate to songwriters for premium streams, given Spotify now has to pay licensing for both books and music from the same price tag — which will only be a dollar higher than when music was the only premium offering. Additionally, Spotify will reclassify its duo and family subscription plans as bundles as well.
Fuck stopify. If u have any respect/appreciation for music and who created it you should not be using spotify.
I hope their platform soon becomes over inundated with AI slop from Udio and Suno to the point it is unusable and collapses.
I’ve tried all the popular alternatives, and not one was better.
Theoretically, buying the songs without DRM felt best, but having enjoyed nearly 6,5K different artists on Spotify so far, that won’t really work.
Unfortunately, as an average consumer, that means I’m sticking with Spotify for now.
Although it’s far from the best, Deezer has a much fairer royalties compensation method, which is more closely based on a per-user basis, rather than total amount of minutes listened (that Spotify currently employs).
This isn’t super related to OPs post but I thought it might be worth mentioning aswell.
I’ve been using Deezer for a while now. Not only is the streaming quality (FLAC) much better but also the artist compensation much fairer. Plus, they at least act as if they actually cared for the customer…
Gotta love all my friends who are really into music who happily use Spotify and don’t give a shit it is a weapon of class warfare being used on musicians disguised as a music player!
I basically lost all my drive to make something of my love of creating music seeing how little anyone in my society actually values music or musicians in terms of material support and reward, it is honestly pretty scary how broken music has become.
Walk me through this.
Before Spotify, I’d buy a record (physical or digital) and listen to that. I pay the artist once. After Spotify, I buy a record and listen to it on Spotify. I pay the artist the normal record price and there’s a long tail from stream payouts (unless they don’t reach the payout threshold).
Before Spotify, if someone heard a song and didn’t buy the record, they didn’t pay the artist. After Spotify, if they still don’t buy a record, the artist now earns from stream payouts.
Finally, before Spotify, if someone bought a record but stopped buying after Spotify, the artist loses that record purchase. This is definitely bad. Was Spotify the real reason? Would something other than Spotify have pulled them away? What levels of fame are materially affected by this?
Do artists have to pay to be on Spotify? Is that the issue?
the artist now earns from stream payouts.
Do artists have to pay to be on Spotify? Is that the issue?
The issue is that artists don’t make any actual money on Spotify, they are being forced to put their music on Spotify because that is where you have to put your stuff if you want to be a successful recording musician.
Meanwhile a couple of years ago the Spotify ceo said in defense of completely destroying any semblance of money making from recording music:
“There is a narrative fallacy here, combined with the fact that, obviously, some artists that used to do well in the past may not do well in this future landscape, where you can’t record music once every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough,” said Ek.
Streaming is great, but the structural evisceration of musicians and the value of labor in composing and producing is basically negative at this point given the huge amount of time that must go into a track to get it 100% there and ready for listeners.
The thread you linked says what I said.
I’ve been doing DIY music since I was a kid. The vast majority of bands are never going to make any money ever. Spotify didn’t change that. Streaming didn’t cause that. The reality of every kid with a guitar thinking music is about making money not having fun is what did that.
I don’t subscribe to this cynical of a viewpoint, it isn’t inevitable that recording music is not valued labor, it is a cultural choice same as any other.
I live in the richest country on earth, it is a subjective choice to devalue the labor of musicians and decouple it from the profits of music companies.
Who the fuck has a label? Do you know anything about music that isn’t already incredibly corporate? When was the last time you went to a DIY show and bought handmade merch off a band touring in their minivan? Compare that to the last time you bought a record from a label or merch from an online store run through not the band.
There are more than likely 300+ bands in a 20 to 50 mile radius around you. Do you support all of them as much as you’re pushing people on the internet to support all music? What about the really bad cover bands? Them too?
Your statements paint a picture that you have no idea what I meant by “levels of fame” because fucking no one makes money off music unless you get lucky. There’s just too much because music is fun.
Your statements paint a picture that you have no idea what I meant by “levels of fame” because fucking no one makes money off music unless you get lucky. There’s just too much because music is fun.
Again I don’t see any quantitative evidence to accept this framing of the status quo as inevitable or reflective of some fundamental tendency of human artists to overproduce art.
Capitalists have systematically stole the labor of musicians and normalized and absolutely absurd vision of austerity where the only way to make money is by doing things that people don’t want to do. It is absurd, and this ideology is pretty easy to locate the motivation behind, it makes us good compliant factory workers.
So you’ve bought every album from every artist you’ve ever listened to? Or, like the rest of us, do you have a limited amount of resources and have made strategic decisions about who to support? Because if you’re not dropping $20 in the tip jar of the next busker you see, you’re a huge fucking hypocrite.
I have not devalued music at all. You have, multiple times. You’ve also said that music has to be about money which is pretty fucking capitalistic. I’ve highlighted it’s about fun multiple times. You keep advocating for labels and ignore DIY which means you’ve already established a class system in music. You’ve provided no quantitative evidence to show you support any music and seem to hype up record labels whose business is built on licensing.
Should everyone get paid for all their music? Fuck yeah. Can I afford to pay every band? Fuck no. Did Spotify or streaming or even the fucking radio do that? Nope. Sure fucking didn’t. The market saturation did because music isn’t about money, it’s about fun. If you want it to be your job, good fucking luck. That’s just simple commerce. Not capitalism. If everyone on the commune is just making bead necklaces and there’s only one customer looking to buy one necklace, is that customer fucking all the people on the commune except the person they bought from?
I really wish there was a better alternative to push my friends to. I do use Bandcamp, so at least I know more of my $$$ are going to the artists and I can take the music with me, but I’m not sure about the platform long-term.
As a musician and composer it really took the life out of me as a musician was seeing an alternative to bandcamp never really form and then one day waking up to it bought by Epic.
I didn’t cry that day, but I might as well have, it made me extraordinarily sad to see that headline and I imagine there are actually countless talented musicians out there who will never actuate on their creative vision because the environment for music production is at this point, downright hostile towards artists and musicians.
It takes an obscene amount of work to take a song from something that has promise to being as polished as listeners demand nowadays, and they won’t even give your song a change on actual speakers. You have to twist and warp your music so it sounds good on essentially monophonic phone speakers with shitty frequency coverage or otherwise nobody will give it a try on speakers for actually listening to music.
🙃
It seems that ampwall.com may come sometime as an alternative to Bandcamp? Time will tell…
Not sure if this is exactly good news, but Epic Games doesn’t own it anymore, it was sold to Songtradr.
As bad as Epic is, probably worse…
Even though Bandcamp was profitable the new CEO said this after buying it
the financial state of Bandcamp has not been healthy
So they’re probably looking for any way to cut costs. They fired half of the staff on day 1, including anyone who tried to unionize
🤷♂️ not really, none of these corporations are real in any sense that matters other than sucking up actual companies that actually make the world a better place and mining the goodwill out of them until they are cynical, worthless husks that corporations use to fleece consumers into buying products from before they realize their favorite company/brand is dead in everything but name.
the largest music licensing platform in the world
Doesn’t sound too good to me. Bandcamp used to be where I could get music from smaller artists who couldn’t afford clearing samples (as they weren’t making money) and I worry a lot of that will be lost.
Still is, for now. I run a small vaporwave tape label via Bandcamp. No significant changes under Epic Games or Songtradr that I’ve noticed. That could change, though.
That’s how it always begins.
But on a more positive note, care to share the label or more about your experience about it? With regards to Bandcamp and more generally.
Sure, https://mysticspools.bandcamp.com/
Most of it is pretty fun- find music, reach out to artist, make a few tapes. We just do small runs of 25-100 tapes depending on how much will sell. The worst part IMO is order fulfillment, you either pay a third party a boatload or you DIY and packing 100 cassettes is a bit of a drag. Coming up with good art if the artist doesn’t already have something is quite difficult. The label is on a short hiatus for that reason, but I think we’ll do some more tapes now that some labels have dried up. There’s waxing and waning periods when it comes to these little micro labels, and I can tell people are feeling the economic squeeze.
The most fun part is mastering to tape and dubbing. I’ve got a Nakamichi Dragon and 3x NAD 6300, and I’ve dubbed probably 500-600 tapes across them all. Dunno what it is about tapes, but I really like em.
It will change, I promise you. I am so confident I will literally bet my girlfriend’s chihuahua on it.
Everyone on Lemmy and the fediverse as a whole should be aware of this pattern. I just hope something can fill in before it gets too bad.
I’m keeping an eye on Faircamp.
I see a dystopian future where all art is made by ai and approved by big brother. Artists were always a source of wrongthink afterall. It will be clean, sanitary, and devoid of humanity.
100% where we are headed with this backwards capitalist approach to ai. Make bots churn out art, films, music, anything creative really, so the proles have more time for mindless manual labor
Ah yes, and unsanctioned art will be classified as a form of terrorism.
And most people will be perfectly happy to consume that and nothing else ever.
How about https://qobuz.com ? I’ve bought some flac files from them.
You can’t use Qobuz if you’re behind a VPN. It makes me sad because I wanted to try this.
I just downloaded Bandcamp, and after searching for my favorite artists, almost none are on the platform aside from 1-2. Did a search on like 20-25. This is why I use Spotify. Maybe if artists started acknowledging Bandcamp as a legitimate alternative to Spotify, then of course I’d listen there. But right now most stuff by my favorite bands are either covers or remixes.
Chicken and the egg, be the change you want to be, but also I am not absolutist about using Spotify.
I just think Spotify and other streaming services are vehicles of class warfare against musicians that also happen to play music. I understand if you like the playing music part!
I use Napster. I chose it way back when Spotify paid for the Rogan podcast, from a list of platforms that pay artists more. I’m not sure if that’s true any longer, but look it up! I’ve been really happy with their service. (And it’s really full circle for me, since I used their original service decades ago.)
ETA I can’t vouch for the accuracy of this site, but it says Napster is still one of the top-paying platforms.
How does this compare to Tidal?
According to that site, Napster pays more. Here’s the info on TIDAL:
Qobuz
All the streamers suck; plus Spotify definitely sucks the most and it has the most subscribers. So I do my best to support artists I love by buying their albums in some physical form (vinyl if possible because it encourages active listening), t-shirts when I need a t-shirt, fan clubs, etc. It’s all I can think to do.
It’s all I can think to do.
I think you thought of a lot of good things to do!
I don’t mean to be overly cynical about people, this is a problem of systems and normalization of things that shouldn’t be normalized primarily, the people are mainly just trying to survive.
sigh
I say this a lot to people on Lemmy, but everyone here (including you) is honestly so much nicer and more emotionally intelligent than people on other places on the internet
Many of us here might even be toxic in other contexts (I am certainly not perfect at keeping away from being overly negative or argumentative with people), but what matters is which version of someone we invite in the door to our community.
We can invite in any version of people we want, and I agree in general I think the fediverse invites in the better version of people and it is one of the primary reasons I love this weird, loosely connected blob of non-corporate social media.
The thing is, you’re buying from their record labels, not directly from artists. And then it depends on their contract how much they actually get. But they are still getting more from it, I guess.
It helps when the band runs their own label.
… Class warfare?
How much do they really care? I’m not usually a quality snob, especially since I frequently use gear of varying quality making it moot, but wouldn’t most people who are really into music at least consider the competition that offers higher quality files at similar if not the same price?
Or are they the type to only have local FLAC with their DAC? Because I like my collection but streaming is still worth the convenience for jumping into a new album.
I have spent a lotttt of time messing around with music production and learning what is pseudo-science (a whole fuckton of it) and what is real science. In all of the ABx testing I have done, read about, and seen demonstrated in person myself a quality MP3 with a decent bitrate encoding (idk 128kps or so?) using a decent algorithm and hell even a sampling rate of 41khz will produce an audio recording that when played back on a hifi audio system and level matched (EXTREMELY IMPORTANT, it is well known in mastering and mixing that a louder mix always sounds better at first glance) is indistinguishable from the source .wav file to the human ear (I don’t care how super human you claim your ear is).
People make this silly mistake of thinking that digitization introduces these sharp staircase edges into audio waveforms, which is actually kind of a hilarious misconception (which I completely understand, not trying to insult people’s intelligence) because the entire idea of digitizing a waveform into a bandwidth-limited digital waveform is utterly reliant on every the analog reproduction of a digital square wave/stair step function with a voicecoil and diaphragm, physical hardware components with shape, size and crucially mass, must necessarily create a smooth analog waveform because physical hardware components have mass and momentum, they aren’t theoretical ideas. It is better to think of a bandwith limited digital waveform as a series of movement commands for an RTS unit in Starcraft 2. The unit will naturally path between discrete points in a way that creates fluid movement, fundamentally it wouldn’t make any sense for the unit to just teleport directly to where you click and then teleport directly to where you click next etc…
Believe I’ve gone down a similar path. I agree, but I assumed the layman dedicated music fan would at least be curious.
And on another note we need more discussion music and audio production around Lemmy.
In my experience those kinds of people are Ice Spice fans.
Who think that SSSniperwolf arriving at another person’s house live on Insta and doxxing them during a manic episode is ‘slay’.
There’d a lot to unpack here
Wut
Soon we’ll have AI music generators and most people will be perfectly happy to only ever listen to what those churn out.
I mean, we’ll see.
Maybe.
Maybe we will just look back at the period that is rapidly coming to a close as a golden era of music (and video games for that matter) where the tools became sophisticated, affordable and distributed for music production but venture capital hadn’t yet destroyed any last vestiges of the monetary value of musician’s labor (audio engineer’s included) in recording contexts.
Of course, I am sure Spotify and other streaming services are coming around to the value of recorded music being unsustainably low, I mean everybody knows it deep down right? That is why they are going to continue to raise their prices. From the perspective of Spotify, the artists that actually do the work of making Spotify a valuable company aren’t in principle excluded from their share of the pie when the line starts to go back up and the company has a chance to reverse some of the belt tightening and sacrifices everybody had to make to keep the lights on… but every single one of these vapid losers believes deep down in their bones that the rules of the game say that it isn’t the responsibility of shareholders or upper management of Spotify to just hand the musicians their fare share of the increasing profits, or even alert them to the fact that profits are in fact increasing in the first place. Musicians are not the customers nor the shareholders of Spotify, they are the commodified, interchangeable contractors that aren’t much different than the day laborers who hang out outside of most Home Depots in the US looking for handyman work.
This is like when the English saw that the only crop Irish peasants could afford to grow on the side for subsistence farming to feed their families, potatoes, were getting destroyed by a potato blight, and decided that it would send the wrong message to let those Irish peasants have any of the rest of the crops that Irish farmers were growing to sell to foreign markets to simply pay the English rent for their farms … crops that were not significantly impacted by the potato blight because it would make the Irish reliant on handouts and encourage a problematic tendency towards apathy and entitlement stubbornly latent in the Irish population.
🔥 Burn 🔥 It 🔥 Down 🔥
(with love)
Please, people, for the love of the gods, stop using Spotify. There are numerous other services that are so much better value for your money and don’t treat artists (as much) like trash.
And that being said, try to support your beloved artists directly as much as you can. Buying digital downloads or physical media will give them more money than a lifetime of streaming ever would. Plus you get to keep the higher-quality music even if the platform or artist goes tits-up.
It’s too convenient. Most people just want easy access and don’t even think of the downstream impacts. If a song or two goes unavailable, probably won’t notice. There is gonna need to be an alternative that is cheap and feature rich along with Spotify missing some steps. It’s here for awhile.
You are not wrong, but there are other services that are just as convenient and for less money. Spotify knows they are the “default” music streaming platform and they are exploiting that.
A quick Google puts the top two at Apple and Amazon. So that is a big no for me boss. I am pretty sure the next ones listed are just torrent front ends. I have a life now so no time for that…spotify it is.
I use Tidal. It may not be much better than Spotify, but it’s better than Spotify.
Audio quality is better and they pay the artists the most of all the major streaing platforms. I’ve been using Tidal for 2 years and have been very happy with the switch
One of these services needs to release a feature like Spotify Connect, can’t switch without a replacement for that.
Spotify Connect
Unless I’m reading this wrong, is this just Spotify’s solution for listening with friends? If so, that’s far from a Spotify exclusive feature.
Edit: Okay. So it’s their version of Airplay. It’s too bad Apple never opened it up. Streaming to remote devices has works for almost 20 years now in the Apple ecosystem.
What is a better alternative, aside from just buying the media directly?
Well better than Spotify is a real low bar. I’m on an apple music family plan and I like it but if I weren’t I’d probably get tidal. And they actually dropped the price of their high quality tier.
I used Tidal for a year but went back to Apple Music. I don’t understand what people like about Tidal that Apple Music doesn’t offer.
They pay the artist more. And I like how they handle interacting with collaborative works.
It’s really 3 peanuts instead of 4. Streaming just doesn’t provide a lot of money for artists.
That’s true. I still use Bandcamp. But as someone who listens to a lot of rap when I’m on a track and “view artist” I appreciate Tidal allowing me to choose which artist. Apple music defaults to the firs listed artist.
I got a few months of Apple Music with some device, was happy to ditch Spotify. Not very good, preferred Spotify’s UI and logic, but still a better alternative, and at least not pushing podcasts in my face (which I have zero interest in). I will never use Spotify again
And they actually dropped the price of their high quality tier.
This is what we call competition, kids… i know most people don’t understand the concept but it is supposed to make consumer make a change by providing a good deal.
This is the opposite we see nowadays, where they fuck you and say it is fine because “reasons”
Tidal will no longer keep its high-res, lossless and spatial audio content locked behind a £20/$20-per-month “HiFi Plus” subscription. Instead, it is now moved into a single individual user plan, costing a lower-cost, Spotify-matching £11/$11 per month.
Previously, users paid that price for CD-quality FLAC files, but needed to opt for the pricier plan to unlock 24-bit/192kHz tracks and Dolby Atmos content.
That’s now all changed as of 10th April, which saw the new £11/$11 per month plan implemented.
And specifically to your point
This price drop only puts further pressure on Spotify to improve the quality of its catalogue, which is currently capped at 320kbps in its Premium tier, and has no native support for spatial audio tracks.
That alone should be enough to get people considering other options. I’m sure there’s more beyond the big three too.
I’m enjoying Tidal
Could you give me some examples of alternative services? I’m paying spotify right now, but i’ll love to ditch it.
I’m enjoying Tidal
Thanks for the recommendation, I was worried they would be missing some of my artists but they had 99% of my music. Can’t wait to ditch Spotify.
ETA: dear lord the sound quality is so much better. I had no idea what I was missing.
Yeah, happily using Tidal as well. Haven’t missed any music that wasn’t also missing from Spotify, so…
Yeh, it’s pretty amazing.
Only thing I miss from Spotify are the user generated playlists, where I can search for something like “liquid drum and bass” and get a bunch of playlists
Does Tidal have a lightweight Linux client that’s kept up-to-date?
Tidal on Linux is a crap shoot, which sucks because pipewire is awesome for HiRes music since it can change sample rate on the fly to match a source. Best bet is Firefox and their web player, and using the middle tier “high” that’s blue colored, and letting pipewire play @ 44100
Check this web player wrapper, it allows for high and Max quality
https://github.com/Mastermindzh/tidal-hifi?tab=readme-ov-file#features
That runs on chromium, which in Linux is HARD locked to 48000, so every single song will be resampled.
Unfortunately, I’ve only found a wrapped up web client thing. Using the web page is probably similar.
The wrapped up web client works better than the native client on windows, tho. Not sure on sound quality, I haven’t had an issue tho
If you are talking about Tidal HiFi, the UI might be similar to the web version but apparently itbruns on a modified version of chrome that allows HiFi music? I did test it some months ago and the quality difference is noticeable.
Yeh, the electron wrapped Tidal HiFi for Linux. I just checked the GitHub, and it says it supports High and Max settings thanks to Widevine.
I swapped from Spotify to Tidal on windows and was blown away. Shortly after I started daily-driving Linux. I haven’t done an A/B between the Linux electron version and the windows desktop version, but it hasn’t annoyed me like Spotify did.According to another commenter chromium on Linux is hard capped on quality, so although it’s noticeable vs the web version, it’s not actual Max quality. I haven’t noticed it although my headphones should be able to show the difference (sony MDR 7506, I know, yes, for everything, people say that it doesn’t sound nice, I don’t care I love it) so idk.
Qobuz/Tidal/Deezer?
Sure, although keep in mind this will vary by region due to licensing issues.
Deezer is probably Spotify’s best direct competitor. They are priced equally (depending on region) and now offer high-res streaming as default instead of a paid extra. They’ve been expanding with new features such as lyrics, collab playlists, song identification, and they recently improved their recommendation system. They also offer a discount if you buy subs yearly instead of monthly so you can save if you like the platform.
Apple Music is also an option now that Apple has put in some work to make the platform easier to use on non-Apple devices such as the recently added Windows app. It’s not as feature-rich as Deezer but if you don’t use those added features anyway then it is an option. I personally would phrase it as “has less bloat”. If you own any Apple devices already then it will have tighter integration with them.
Tidal is the old favourite of audiophiles and music appreciators. They have been expanding their platform with new features and music and, somewhat recently, have also lowered their prices. High-res streaming is now included in the base sub tier. All of these alternatives pay artists more than Spotify but Tidal has one of the best artist payouts.
Qobuz is similar to Tidal and is a premium platform with a focus on quality. They are a newer service and are still expanding their regions, so I don’t have personal experience with them as they only recently opened up to my country. Their price and feature set looks competitive, though, and their UI does look slick. They also have better artist payouts.
Amazon Music apparently has better payouts for artists but Amazon is a shit company so I’ve never looked into them further. I’ll include YouTube Music here as well which has shitty payouts and is a shitty company.
Tidal is the only one for me since it’s the only one with an unofficial HiFi Linux client, which is a wrapper around the web version but with HiFi enabled.
I’m happy reading that they are decent on pay for artists.
What’s the USP of Deezer over Apple Music now that the latter has lossless streaming as well (and live lyrics for longer)?
None of these have good app support compared to Spotify, sadly. Not supported by my car, nor my Linux desktop, or home speakers.
Oh and Deezer pays even less to artists than Spotify.
Oh and Deezer pays even less to artists than Spotify.
I don’t think that’s accurate. Care to provide your source?
Apple Music also has Dolby atmos and much higher quality audio files compared to Spotify.
The only thing Spotify has on everyone is excellent playlists. I just use SongShift to copy the playlists over.
Tidal is okay but I prefer Apple Music since it has a better UI, cheaper price and is more user friendly for my non-audiophile family members.
if you use Apple Music and have a desktop/laptop look into Cider 2. Incredible streaming music player. https://cider.sh/
The interesting thing about Tidal is that is was originally owned by artists (Jay-Z, Beyoncé; Kanye West; Madonna; Jason Aldean; Alicia Keys; Arcade Fire; Coldplay’s Chris Martin; Rihanna; and deadmau5) Who have since sold off a majority share to Block, while Jay-Z kept a board seat and other artists still have shares. Curious if it will last.
Just looked into these. It doesn’t look like any of these have official Linux apps :(
Apple Music has a web based player
Amazon Music
I invested heavily in the Amazon Music ecosystem, I bought hundreds of albums on there, and the platform is now very nearly unusuable. I cannot even listen to the songs that I paid for without also having to listen to ads. And the Android app now hides the downloads in some hidden folder so I can’t even download them and listen to them on another player. It makes me furious.
I’ve actually gone back to CDs, if you can believe it. It’s kind of nice sometimes, especially for full album plays, but I do miss a nice big playlist of my favorite songs from all artists.
I can believe it. I still have multiple libraries of physical media, and I pretty much never buy anything new that I can’t likewise physically own. I might rip and make MP3’s or transcode or emulate, or whatever, for convenience, but sometimes it’s just nice to be able to stick the disk or cartridge in the machine and have it just work without any of the associated modern ancillary bullshit.
Everything wants to be a service now. I just find that so irritating.
Apple Music and Tidal.
As an Apple hater; Apple Music. Cheaper, good cross-platform frontends, more equitable to artists (though by no means satisfactorily so), has a Wrapped equivalent (though who actually cares). Maybe Spotify added something it doesn’t have in the several years since I switched but, I doubt it
Apple Music is on Android?
Yup
It is, but the app is frustrating. It has a mind of its own sometimes and, subjectively, basic UI functionality was an afterthought. Also no support on a galaxy watch.
That said, it sounds great and has a solid catalog (except the DJ Krush/Toshinori Kondo collab, Ki-Oku. Grrrr)
While it doesn’t have well known artists, indie streaming Resonate prides itself as having the most generous (or at least, close to) payments to artists. To support this, it has an innovative payment model akin to higher purchase. You pay a little for the first listen to a track, but the price increases through subsequent listens. After 9 listens, you own the track outright. The total cost of ownership is around $0.9
That’s a cool model, at least at first glance
Really, really long sigh
TIDAL.
😂😂😂
In seriousness, what is the payment to artists like nowadays on TIDAL? Dare I even ask?
As far as I know, it’s $0.14 per stream. Spotify’s rate is $0.03. Pretty substantial difference. TIDAL has the highest rate in the streaming industry.
that’s a lot more evin more than deezer at 0.0064$
I think that you are off by about an order of magnitude. Spotify pays $0.003 per stream, and title apparently pays $0.01 -0.05.
I think this is correct. In cents, this is 0.3¢ and 1-5¢ respectively. Zeroes are too hard for my mushy brain…
I’ve heard good things about tidal in regards to paying artists (more) fairly. Does anyone know more about the alternatives or has experience with them? Also in terms of the library size I’m not sure how the services compare…
I believe tidal actually has a larger library than Spotify, and offers a tier that lets you listen to higher quality of music. Similar pricing to Spotify I think. I had it for a while and really liked it, only stopped paying for it because I’m broke so I’m sailing the seas for now
I love my Tidal subscription. Most everything that’s on Spotify is on Tidal now unless it’s an exclusive. Most annoying part will be tranferring your playlists
Just cancelled, have been a customer since 2015 or so.
I’ve said many times I would gladly pay more, if it were an elective extra cost that goes 100% to the artists you listen to.
So $11/mo to Spotify, then I could elect to pay another amount of my choosing that gets split up based on what I’m listening to and goes 100% to the artists. I don’t love it but it would be an acceptable solution to me.
A better solution would be for Spotify to be fair and pay artists accordingly from the start… buttttt Capitalism, and Spotify is publicly traded so no chance of that ever happening. I’m out.
I cancelled too. they were resetting my password and forcing me to create a new one once or twice a week. all because i would use spotify on my desktop and my phone.
they only help they would offer was “you password is not secure”. yes, my 16character random generated password is not secure. fuck em.
Tidal is your friend
I wish. But it says it’s not available in my region. Which is really weird in the current globalized world.
The nice thing about Tidal is the attention to detail about the music or album you’re listening to. You get writers, producers and recording musicians for all the tracks. Sometimes additional Artwork.
Apple had the right idea all those years ago when they were selling those enhanced digital albums. Almost felt like purchasing a vinyl or cd and getting all the goodies that come with it. INCLUDING properly crediting the artists. Not sure they do that very well anymore.
(Note I’m not super familiar with Tidal)
I had a look earlier in the year and I believe Napster pay very decent artist royalties and offer a Spotify migration service. I will be moving to them after this.
This is why I went for Tidal:
Tidal takes a look back at a HiFi Plus subscriber’s top streamed artist at the end of every month, and then allocates the direct payment to that listener’s most played artist. Qualified artists who enroll in the Direct Artist Payout program will be able to collect the payouts allocated to them on a monthly basis.
But they recently changed their pricing and I’m no longer paying 20 so I’m not sure if they still do that or not. I have heard good things about napster too.
They suck ass. Stop paying them money.
Never heard of it.
Thank God for a certain manager. Haven’t paid for Spotify in years. Fuck em.
I’ve ditched Spotify last year when their app suddenly has started draining battery on my phone (and also because of them being so eager to give Rogan a platform). I’ve switched to Deezer, but I’ve ran into the same issue I’ve had with Spotify for a while - even if I download a playlist for offline usage, it’ll still try to connect to the internet, so if I was somewhere with poor reception, it’d get stuck on a spinning circle for a minute before giving up and showing me the songs I’ve wanted to play. I ended my Deezer subscription, rebuilt the library on my laptop, and just manually transfer files to my phone. I get instant access to my music with no delays, with music players that offer much better experience and handle shuffle and queues the way I want to, and aren’t a glorified Chrome tab on desktop. and if I really like an album, I’ll just straight up buy one. I listen to music a fucking lot (two years ago i was in top 0.2% of my country’s Spotify users), and according to some screenshots of my Spotify Wrapped, I’ve played my artists songs for 1200 minutes, which translates to 300-400 plays at best (probably less than that, given that many of their songs are around 6 to 8 minutes long). given that, from what I’ve found online, 1000 plays gives artists 4 bucks, I could just buy two of their songs on Bandcamp and pirate the rest of their music, and they’ll still get more money in a year from me.
ve ran into the same issue I’ve had with Spotify for a while - even if I download a playlist for offline usage, it’ll still try to connect to the internet, so if I was somewhere with poor reception, it’d get stuck on a spinning circle for a minute before giving up and showing me the songs I’ve wanted to play.
That’s by design and all streaming apps would do it like that to enforce abuse.
thing is, it didn’t do that in the past, or at least it wouldn’t be that noticeable to me. but some time ago Spotify introduced a feature that would automatically add “smart” suggestions to the playlist, and it makes sense it requires network access for that. what doesn’t make sense is that it still wants the connection even when I kept that feature disabled.
Probably it wasn’t noticeable. Imagine this scenario: somebody would pay a monthly fee, would download “entire” Spotify and then forever listen to it in offline mode. And since it’s offline, artists won’t get payed as well.
weekly PSA that spotify is a dumb company who makes no money because they’re stupid.
To put it bluntly, between the artists, and the musicians, there is the publisher (the traditional music company) the money pretty much only goes to the publisher, because spotify doesn’t want to make money, nor do they want artists to make money. And the artists put their shit on spotify because people believe that spending 15 dollars a month on a service that doesnt pay artists, apparently pays artists.
Go support your local musical artists.
And the artists put their shit on spotify because people believe that spending 15 dollars a month on a service that doesnt pay artists, apparently pays artists.
It’s probably more a case of artists acknowledging the fact that streaming services are one of, if not the, primary sources of music discovery and consumption for many these days. Even if they won’t make money off it, by not being available on these platforms, they may as well not exist for most people. That’s something that only huge, already established names can pull without feeling it.
you know what else streams your music? The fucking internet, that shits free! Literally just posting your shit on a torrent will give you tons of traction to work with. Especially if you already have a pretty significant listener base. Plus you also get the benefit of people like me who are significantly more inclined to buy physical releases of media.
Regardless, streaming is a good way of getting people to hear your shit, if you really want to use a streaming service, don’t go through a publisher, or at the very least, a mainstream publisher. They tend to fuck you over.
Sure, but the barrier to entry is significant enough to still deter most people. Even assuming they aren’t bothering with port forwarding and seeding, most people seem like they can’t be bothered with any pattern of consumption more complicated than finding content on major streaming platforms, and the music streaming services haven’t yet gotten annoying enough for most people. They’ll take a peek, go “Do I want FLAC, V0 or 320? WTF is an APE?” and bail again.
We can disagree as to whether it should be that way or not, but I’d wager that the reach of streaming services for a new band far exceeds that of uploading a torrent to a random tracker and hoping it takes off. Unless people already know of you to look for your music, you need to hope a huge number of them are just auto-snatching anything new. On private trackers, sure, you’ll get a bunch of people who auto-snatch any FLAC upload from the current year, but you’re talking about <50,000 users in those cases, and a good chunk of the auto-snatchers are just people looking to build buffer who won’t even listen to most of what they snatch. On the other hand, nobody is auto-snatching all the torrents going up on public trackers, they’d run out of space in no time at all.
i mean yeah, though nothing stops you from putting it up on both services so, don’t come crying to me lol.
Your publisher might but that’s because they’re a cunt lol. Up to the artist though, personally i’d only release it underground, give it to the people who deserve it. It might take off from there, i’m not going to stop other people from spreading it via clear web mirrors or uploads onto streaming services like youtube or anything.
What are your thoughts around generating traction with a torrent? I have two friends who are both sitting on their albums and thinking about how best to release them. I hope to release something one day too and refuse to use the likes of spotify on principle.
hmm, if you do release them, it would be prudent to release them with related material, throw in a txt file with some additional little trivia facts or tidbits, as well as some links to places to buy your material, or even donate directly to you. Oh also you should probably throw in some interesting stickers or prints or something, things that aren’t clothing and CDs can be interesting sometimes.
If you want to do a multi platform release, do an exclusive release on the torrents, i.e. throw in some extra unreleased material, or a second mixing/mastering of a track or something. Throwing something in to make the listeners feel appreciated is always good.
Obviously generate some public attention for it, you’re probably only going to attract existing torrent users, but drumming up some sort of conversation around music rights, supporting artists and all that is going to be a good idea. Notably, since you’re the artist putting it up, you have the rights over it, so it’s perfectly legal. If you want to get really funny you can openly license it, so that way people can torrent it without “technically” breaking the law. Though that’s not explicitly required i don’t think. Naturally the most obvious way is to title a song “pirate this” or something lmao. “exercise to the user” as us TMC players would say.
yeah im pretty much out of ideas here lol, hopefully that helped.
These are some decent suggestions, I’ma try this with our old albums. aside from tpb what are good options, sitewise, for this? no links just names pls, if you’d be so kind
idk much about clearnet trackers, so you’d probably wanna go ask around in the piracy instances (dbzer0 is a prominent one, though it’s my root instance, so i’m biased lol) for some information on that. But one very real option that you have is just posting the magnet link in the clearnet, since it’s not copyrighted material (well, you own the copyright, and you legally allow it to be distributed as such, so it’s not like the government is going to whack you upside the head or anything) Makes it easy to get and disseminate, though you would benefit from having it on trackers obviously. Though one really cool thing, is that trackers are pretty autonomous, so chances are if you release it, and it gets significant enough traffic over the clearnet, or attention from nerds like me it’ll probably make its way to trackers organically. I make no guarantees but if you give me a shout i can have a look into spreading it onto i2p as well. (you should probably mention that somewhere in the thing so that way people pick up on it)
Oh and uh one other little thought, you can always put a little tidbit in there like “feel free to send us a few bucks, or share this song with your friends” to promote natural growth of it. There’s about as much flexibility to it as you can imagine.
oh and a final note if you aren’t familiar, probably worth being careful about tracker IP leeches, they often just nab ips that visit public trackers and yeet them to ISPs on the regular, shouldn’t get you in trouble since its your own material, but they don’t care, and the ISP will just send you a cease and desist saying “hey don’t do this” or in extreme cases, yeeting your ass. Again, check out the piracy instances, they have useful resources for this stuff.
So many pro tips, thanks m8, time to put together some supplementary materials!
I always wonder how the hell don’t make money, it must be some kind of “smart” accounting.
they don’t make money because they’re a tech company, they pull in VC funding, and then lose money year after year, they don’t need to make any money because the model is to get everyone on your platform, and then start making money. (which apparently spotify hasn’t figured out yet)
Ahhh yes, future enshitification!
i’m still trying to figure out how they’re going to enshittify, because it’s already expensive as shit. And they still make no money, so.
Higher prices, worse quality, intrusive recommendations, ad filled basic tier?
It all depends on how much people are willing to put up with.
higher prices would be a tough bargain i think, list price is already 15 dollars a month, which i think is pushing it. They already drop songs on the regular, the only way to make it worse would be to have less songs, i.e. even less worth the price. Recommendations are already a thing, but thats a different problem. Ads already exist, and they’ve already been memed on, though that is a free tier, so.
I can’t imagine people putting up with much more, given that for fifteen dollars a month you could buying an entire whole ass album from a band that you like every month.
I 100% agree with everything you said. It’s just that I thought people wouldn’t put up with the stuff Netflix has been pulling but I was wrong.
Music is different though…
It’s because they are 100% reliant on the record labels, and the record labels know that. So the record labels can charge Spotify whatever they want, because what is Spotify going to do?
That’s why Spotify tried to hard to move into Podcasts and now Audio books, so that they are less reliant on the record labels.
Spotify negotiated shit deals when they were a startup and they’ll basically forever be not profitable because of it.
they should’ve became a publisher, or started one on the side, the profit would be immense if they thought of doing that.
Seriously. They had a completely open market, then essentially signed a perpetual deal where something like 40% of gross income is paid out to the labels. It’s absolutely insane how poorly run they were in the beginning.
If they had become a publisher, distributor and/or a label, they’d be on top of the world now.
yeah pretty much. They’d be the single biggest publisher globally, and almost certainly the most profitable.
Their strategy was probably the classic startup strategy. Grow at all costs and figure out profitability later. These days it’s rather obvious that this strategy sucks and is doomed to fail (for most cases).
The big record labels are shareholders in Spotify so they’re happy to get less money in streaming royalties because that’s the part they have to share with artists, but the value of their shares they get to keep all for themselves.
https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/news/who-really-owns-spotify-955388/
ah of course, schizo economics, how could i forget. “trust me, i will hold shares for you, i promise” Though this still isn’t a good position to be in, because now the publishing companies essentially run spotify, so spotify fucked themselves even more lol.
Go support your local musical artists.
I miss X Fest… :(
To add to this, buy their merch and physical copies of their albums. Also, go to shows! Lots of small bands would love a bigger crowd and can be seen for cheap or free.
exactly this, buy merch, buy albums, give them your money directly if you can. (artists, please just let me give you money, i like your shit, maybe i don’t want to buy shit tons of plastic ok?)
This is why I don’t feel bad about pirating
Fun fact of the day The orginal creator of spotify asked a bunch of artists to use there works for his business pitch. And they denied him, to which for his business pitch for investors he pirated audio for the demo.
So everything spotify says about piracy is ironic, because without piracy they wouldnt exist.
Gotta fund Barcelona’s €240 million sponsor deal somehow
Definitely thinking about cancelling with this. I’ve used Spotify as long as I can remember, after finally switching over from pandora radio.
Their shuffle and discovery algorithms suck so much now that it’s nearly impossible to listen to more than 20-30 songs they just keep repeating.
Add on the extra, inserted ads in podcasts, there’s really no reason to continue to use their platform.
Then again, I’m probably going to YT music, which is only marginally better, but since I pay for YT premium already there’s no additional cost
I wish they had something between “top songs” and “completely random” when listening to a band.
Like, sure, Sweet Child of Mine, Welcome to the Jungle, and Paradise City are great and all, but there’s only so often you can listen to them, and the only alternative is to be reminded that Chinese Democracy exists.
YouTube music has something like this. You choose a few artists you like then tune the randomness of what it plays. I have discovered more new artists Ina few months of using it than I have in the decade before that.
Never used it, but I just want to appreciate the design of these three icons: just a speaker radiating sound coming to something resembling a solar system. Simple, yet cool.
Where can I find this setting in YT Music? I’ve had them for a while and never knew this existed…
For me it’s near the top on the apps homepage. Looks like this
haha, so true. On the other hand Chinese Democracy is not that bad ;)
If you find a better place to discover music please lmk (no sarcasm)
Their discovery sucks lately and I hate it.
I like Tidal and rhey pay the most per play to artist’s.
I have tons of playlists and saved music on spotify; how is Tidal at importing data from other services? It’s not really a deal breaker, but I’m really picky about my music (so I don’t really care about “radio” features or curated playlists), so it’d be a real pain in the ass to start from scratch.
They have a feature to import your music from other sites…
It does have Spotify in it.
I thought that was Qobuz. At least I can actually buy music through Qobuz I guess.
