Carving out a niche as a small artist on Spotify

Post by zdragnar » Sat, Jun 27, 2020, 1:07 AM UTC

rewgs wrote: post #238

zdragnar wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it is different in other areas of the country, but even in the nearby metro area, there are at most two or three "indie" stations (that is being generous, since I can only think of one) not counting the university stations that have virtually zero physical reach. Streaming might not pay much, but at least it is possible to be heard at all I suppose.

What do you mean by the term “indie” here? Are the stations themselves not affiliated with larger corporations? Or are they mainly playing independent artists? Or both? I’m a professional musician and categorically reject the “but at least it is possible to be heard at all” angle. No. That is bullshit. Spotify is replacing BOTH album sales and radio play, and yet it pays multiple orders of magnitude worse than either…

Post by sam1r » Sat, Jun 27, 2020, 1:13 AM UTC

dawnerd wrote: post #139

njovin wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is unfortunately a common problem and the only way to beat the algorithm is to turn it against itself. Create few playlists and add songs you like to them and also be diligent about liking and unliking songs. These will heavily influence your recommendations and you should be able to get back on track.

Spotify needs to enable dislike on any song playing, not just in discovery playlists.

Post by microtherion » Sat, Jun 27, 2020, 1:32 AM UTC

devalgo wrote: post #84

crispyporkbites wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not anyones responsibility to ensure indie artists, or any kind of art for that matter, exists It would be nice if people cared about things beyond $$$ and worked on art for the sake of art

>It would be nice if people cared about things beyond $$$ and worked on art for the sake of art True but you generally can't buy groceries or pay your landlord with art.

Post by sam1r » Sat, Jun 27, 2020, 1:49 AM UTC

cageface wrote: post #256

sam1r wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tidal has this! Plus a lot better audio quality, at 1440kbps. It is $10 more though. It allows you to block either 1. the artist or 2. the song track.

There are a lot of things I like about tidal but I had constant network issues even with lossy playback. Tracks were skipping and pausing and taking forever to start on the same network that works flawlessly with other services.

Post by fao_ » Sat, Jun 27, 2020, 4:41 AM UTC

mattmcknight wrote: post #252

rewgs wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but an indie artist is nearly always the songwriter and publisher (no one else owns the publishing rights, hence “independent”). So it’s a fair comparison, and unfortunately, all else being equal, streaming woefully underperforms to radio to the point of tears.

So a radio play gets $0.12 and goes out to 10,000 listeners. Amazon Music Unlimited pays $0.012 per stream, or $120 for 10,000 listeners. Spotify pays $0.00318 per stream, or $31.80 per 10,000 listeners. Maybe radio does haven't that many listeners? But by my math, if your radio play goes out more than 265 people, you are getting less per listen than on Spotify. The real loss is the $15 10 track CD, which someone wou…