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Spotify demonetizes all tracks under 1k streams

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Re: Spotify demonetizes all tracks under 1k streams

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back to torrenting I guess. If I’m not mistaken snoop said he made 45k off 1 billion plays. Thats ridiculous

Ah. Music income numbers, where the details are not actually details. He did say that[1], but the statement is misleading (and has little to do with Spotify). A very rough global average per-stream payout is often estimated at around $0.003 to $0.005. That brings the payout for 1 billion streams between $3,000,000 and $5,000,000. Let's go with the lower end. This is actual money paid out by Spotify for 1 billion stre…

A record label is probably much more of a VC than it is an employer.

The business has changed since streaming and self publishing but the labels took bets on artists and gave them expensive recording studios and marketing dollars, gave them some basic money, and in return took the majority of rights to the first few albums.

They also knew that if the artist truly made it big they would likely go to a different label where they could get better terms or start their own where they’d keep all the money after the initial contract which drove their side higher.

The record label model clearly doesn’t work as well in modern days but it was successful for good reasons at the time it really flourished.

Re: Spotify demonetizes all tracks under 1k streams

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It surprises me how much of my Spotify library is no longer available. There’s at least a few dozen songs in my Spotify library that have been taken off the platform. It shows up in the list greyed out. A lot of good songs too. This probably has more to do with publishers and licensing contracts than artists pulling their music off from platforms. Sometimes even bigger artists' albums disappear when publisher is so…

A lot of that is also bad meta data. I have a few playlists for around 10 years or so. Every so often I have to go in and hunt down greyed out tracks that are no longer there but are available in identical versions elsewhere. Publishers apparently regularly update what they have on the platform and there's a lot of duplication as well between best off albums, remastered albums, etc. And some artists, like Neil Young,…

> Spotify seems very happy to just break everybody's playlists continuously.

I remember this being particularly infuriating with movie soundtracks or other compilations, where individual tracks would often evaporate one day for bogus (licensing) reasons.

> And some artists, like Neil Young, actually pulled most of their content.

Yeah, I actually left Spotify with Neil. Apparently though he and other artists like Joni Mitchell that left at the time are now back on the service as of a few weeks ago.

Re: Spotify demonetizes all tracks under 1k streams

#204

Can someone ELI5: Why is it so hard to just split my monthly subscription money on all the artists that I listened to, proportional to their air time to the total listening time? I really don't get it

Because that would be extremely complex and expensive to do for a negligible effect.

Re: Spotify demonetizes all tracks under 1k streams

#206
post #139
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems silly. The reason they have that problem is that their logic for funneling subscription revenue to streams is broken. This won't fix that fundamental problem. You can still use Spotify to scam money out of the system.

> The reason they have that problem is that their logic for funneling subscription revenue to streams is broken Changing it to splitting out a users monthly payment to what they're actually listening to, would make the abuse they're trying to stop easier and not harder (as it would mean all the money they're trying to launder will go to the correct artist instead of just some of it) Not saying that that's a good argu…

Yea there are better ways to fix the problem but the problem is selling that fix to the big labels. The current system gets them a larger share of the revenue so why would they be interested in changing it?

Re: Spotify demonetizes all tracks under 1k streams

#207

I don’t know much about how music licensing works. But would this cause smaller musicians to decide to pull their stuff off Spotify? I listen to a lot of music on Spotify. And some of it is from smaller indie artists. Not a huge amount, but I’ve definitely listened to songs that are in that It surprises me how much of my Spotify library is no longer available. There’s at least a few dozen songs in my Spotify library…

This is the reason I have stuck with Apple Music so long (and previously Google Play Music). I have a fair number of sentimental tracks that I've carried with me in my collection for decades which aren't on streaming sites.

Spotify doesn't have an answer for this. Just don't listen to things outside the Spotify library. Apple Music (and GPM before it) lets me upload my own tracks and sync them between my devices.

Re: Spotify demonetizes all tracks under 1k streams

#208
post #149
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd wager the income from playing gigs would be substantially lower if you weren't on Spotify.

Your arguments veers close to the "for exposure" payment. People don't go to indie concerts because of a spotify track. Nor to big name concerts. And 20 cents corresponds to around 50 to 100 plays according to the numbers mentioned here.

Your absolutist claim is already false by virtue of the fact that I have gone to an “indie” show after hearing a track on Spotify.

Next?

Re: Spotify demonetizes all tracks under 1k streams

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only Tidal (or Qobuz, or...) would implement a Connect feature that allows me to control my PC desktop from mobile, then I would, but it's been on the "promised features" list for years now. It's a deal-breaker for me.

Yeah Spotify Connect really is solid but that’s why I also went with Roon as it allows me to do that and more.

Yeah it looks like Roon can do this. Might be worth checking out, thanks!

Re: Spotify demonetizes all tracks under 1k streams

#210

This change quite obviously can't negatively impact small artists in any meaningful way. When googling for how much Spotify pay artists per stream, ranges vary a bit. But it seems like a high number is $0.005 per stream, or 200 streams to the dollar. Even if a very prolific artist has 200 songs, averaging 500 plays per year, this would only ever amount to $500 per year. It is not peanuts for a hobby musician, but it…

The change in isolation from Spotify may not impact individual bands. However if this is adopted across all the seven major streaming services, then artists can in theory have 7,006 streams per track without generating a penny of income, even though the streaming vendors have generated revenues.

If YouTube, Spotify, Apple, Tidal, Deezer, Soundcloud, and Amazon all adopt this practice, taking your edge-case artist, they're out of pocket for $3,500 per year.

That makes a situation where the more highly concentrated Spotify's monopoly is, and the less productive an artist is, the fairer the outcome for that small artist. Meanwhile the $3,500 is distributed between the monopolist, and the very large artists on the service. That's a quite uniquely perverse set of economic outcomes.

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