Justice at Spotify

I suppose, in reality, this has been the case for around 3 decades now. Unless you have the marketing department, you don't make money from music sales.

Realize that the royalty holders are not the musicians, but typically the major labels. The musicians get virtually nothing.

The difference is that every artist has a choice if his music lands on Spotify or not - and if he accepts the conditions offered. The main problem of many of these artists is that they signed bad distribution deals with their labels and are giving away a big chunk % of streaming revenues. That isn't Spotifys fault.

Also, according to Spotifys latest financial statement, they are expecting a $200-300m operating loss for 2021, so i find it hard to argue that Spotify is being "too greedy" when they aren't even profitable.

That said, apparently most of Spotify's revenues already goes to pay artists, so it would not be achievable without significant increases in Spotify's fees. This would in turn reduce user numbers, leading to fewer streams, more users turning to piracy, etc.

1. I buy the CD release of music because I like to collect them, and the art is cool (I listen to folk metal and they usually do some cool stuff with album art and the front of the CD).

2. I rip them to FLACs and store them on my plex server

3. I stream them to my phone/etc.

So I'm really used to paying something like... {cost of cd} / {lifetime play count}. Which honestly is probably a lot higher than what a single stream of music earns the artists but a lot lower than 1c per play.

Just as an example, let's take Sonic Firestorm by Dragonforce. I probably started listening in 2007 or so. 14 years. I listened to the entire CD probably at least 3 times a week for the entirety of high school. So 4 years of high school times 52 weeks a year times 3 plays a week times 9 tracks per play is 5616. I'd guess I paid 12 bucks for the CD (it's 10 on amazon right now). So that's 0.00214 dollars per play. And that's just high school. Though admittedly that's one of my favorite albums, but I do think Alestorm and Ensiferum and several other bands are up in that play count too for my 4 years of college.

And I don't think many bands want to make the argument of "yeah but we're one of those bands you're gonna buy our CD for 12 bucks and listen to 3 times and then we end up in the back of your CD holder because every time you flip through you're like 'nah not really feeling them right now' for weeks on end".

So... I dunno. I'm all for paying artists more. But I would really prefer the way we do that is decrease the (massive) cut that goes to the labels and send more to the artists.

I've been buying my CDs on bandcamp as much as I can recently because as I understand it, bands capture a lot more of that sticker price that way. At least it seems like they do. I get CDs from residential addresses in Norway, anyway.