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The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

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Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#62
post #34

The post notes that Spotify pays $0.003-$0.005 per stream, and compares that to the average exec making $200k/year. If Spotify diverted all that exec money to artists, I wonder whether the $0.003-$0.005 figure would change, or if that would be too only amount to It might be fair to criticize Spotify's deal with rights holders of music, but the above line of critique doesn't hold so strong to me. As it happens, $200k/…

Spotify doesn't pay the artists directly. Apple Music doesn't pay the artists directly. Youtube Musice doesn't.... You get my gist. All those pay to the rights holders . Why does no one ever question the rights holders : EMI, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group why the artists are paid pennies?

It isn't just the big labels. Apple Music has a list of distributors they work with:

https://artists.apple.com/partners

CDBaby is popular where 91% of revenue from Apple, Spotify etc goes to the artist.

So then it seems that the price per stream does make a difference.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#64

Spotify's suggestions are horribly bland and insultingly unoriginal compared to Apple's. I keep getting Black Sabbath's Paranoid, the song, in various "deep cuts" and "new music" themed lists and suggestions. It's from 1969. Apple's lists and suggestions may actually have new music.

Yes, I request various bands from the 70s and I get live versions, bootlegs, covers. Never the original.

Going the artist link, it doesn't even list all the albums.

YouTube Music on the other hand has everything and more.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#65
post #60

Long article for a single comment: I quit Spotify because I can’t customise the home page which pushes podcasts and music I’m not interested in. For me I navigate my music via My Liked songs + my own playlists for particular moods. If I open the app and press play it defaults to where I left off. The fact there is a home page which shows options similar to what I like is fine, sometimes useful. Yes I’d prefer to cust…

> The one major gripe is not being able to upload my own songs, I love listening to remixes and covers, youtube, spotify or tiktok has plenty of songs I’d love in my library. But it’s a nightmare for a business model that respects artists and a cost structure that needs to be covered. Again, no real good alternatives that do this well + have a normal library + be legal. But you can, if you have the audio files you ca…

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Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like both of you are correct. It feels to me that Spotify's recommendations easily gets stuck in a 'local maxima' where it just keeps recommending the same music over again with little variation. I found much more variation from other music streaming services where the playlists are supposedly actually human curated. Music just ends up feeling a lot more bland with Spotify, in my experience. I don't even know…

Same experience for me. I think the parent might be a new user. It was good for me for a few years but now it’s just stale as shit.

> I think the parent might be a new user.

I've been using Spotify since 2015.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#67
I’ve moved to Tidal and Bandcamp.

Tidal has roughly the same catalog as Spotify plus high quality / lossless playback options if the album / artist supports it.

Tidal also integrates with a lot of DJ software like Rekordbox and Djay. These apps let you play from Todal but disable recording when using a streaming service.

Bandcamp is the real way to support labels and artists by buying music directly. You download the files and own them and can use them in DJ software and record, take them to the club, etc.

Spotify is a bummer. I made a jukebox app https://jukelab.com with their SDK but the SDK, developer TOS, catalog and whole experience continually is trending away from giving you control over the music.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#69

> Instead, my subscription is probably pooled according to some black box formula and ends up paid to some of their top performers like Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, or The Weeknd. While the indie artist I have been obsessed with gets literally nothing because they don’t meet a certain arbitrary threshold. Well, as a musician myself, I often feel a bit conflicted reading statements like these. After all, as uncomfortable as…

I mean they are revenue-share deals. So each label will get paid a % of Spotify's total revenue according to the number of listens they have and how well they negotiated the deal.

So labels like UMG are going to get a better deal than some indie artist who just has to sign up normally. How much the UMG artists end up getting paid is up to UMG.

The problem is really that 90% of people listen to a few big artists that are owned by these mega-labels. And that distorts the entire economy of the sector.

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