Goodbye Spotify

The positioning is wrong though, in my relationship, Spotify is the third-party.

A third-party that used to pay for streams of my music, has decided to, instead change their terms, and use my music to generate more revenue (which in this case they are using to pay other artists, which is very strategic of them, because now they don’t have to pay those other artists more from their own pockets).

I negotiated with my distributor, distrokid, And paid to have my music distributed to services that pay for streams of my songs.

Suddenly one of these services altered their terms to the above.

And just to clarify, I’m not trying to be difficult. The fact of the matter is that my content has been taken by a third-party, and instead of paying out based off of an agreement, they have decided to take money from the content, creator, and instead use it to pay other artists (it is my strong suspicion that they did in order to not have to pay for transactions, even though this was all part of the arrangement from the beginning).

They have effectively saved themselves $40 million and more popular artists feel better because they are making more money, and the only people that lose out are people that have no real leverage in the situations.

I completely agree three dollars is very little money and is pretty insignificant. But it doesn’t change the fact that this was very strategic and the money that is generated is coming from creators, who have paid to have their content hosted, in exchange for money generation.

If you remember how big of a deal limewire was, this is a similar situation for songs under 1000 streams per year. It is distribution of music, without the consent of the artist, and worse off the platform is monetizing it and the artist does not get that money.

This is a very different situation than something like YouTube ad sense paying out after 1000 views, given that a content creator directly uploads content to YouTube and agrees to their terms.

While I agree we should use own data I do not believe that someone presense is enough to leave a platform.

Big gateway keepers will always be full od questionable people.

Politics is also full od questionable people should we not participate in it?

Has it made earning a living even harder though? Before streaming it was much harder to discover obscure artists from places outside of your own local area, usually you'd go crate-digging vinyls at 2nd hand shops to find the true gems.

I don't understand how enabling access to music from anywhere in the world has made earning a living harder to music artists, the industry was always extremely hard outside of a few lucky ones hand picked by labels to be marketed. The local scenes were (and still are) where most artists could grow their audience, sell albums and merch, it's still the same hard work but now you are able to release your music worldwide in an instant.

Streaming doesn't pay enough on any platform to enable earning a living if you are a small act. And it never will, it's basic economics, there's not enough money from subscriptions and ads to support the millions and millions of artists.

Support the artists, that's orthogonal to Spotify or other streaming services. Buy their albums, merch, go watch their shows.

You don't need to be an "audiophile" or have "high end equipment" to realize that you absolutely want lossless for music archival. How would you want to, say, transcode a collection of MP3 to Opus to fit more tracks onto the same space at acceptable quality without keeping FLACs around?

Although OTOH, people play lossy MP3s over lossy SBC via Bluetooth and don't care, so perhaps the bar of "acceptable quality" is much lower than it seems...

“I gave up Spotify and didn’t replace it. Maybe you’ll like losing what Spotify provides with no obvious gain or substitute, too!”