As a musician, I prefer illegal downloading over Spotify (2011)
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As a musician, I prefer illegal downloading over Spotify (2011)
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Re: As a musician, I prefer illegal downloading over Spotify (2011)
#2Without Spotify and (to a lesser extent) piracy before it, I wouldn’t be listening to 1/10th of the artists I listen to. Maybe it’s just moral cope but I can’t see how it can be made any better for niche or up and coming independent artists.
Re: As a musician, I prefer illegal downloading over Spotify (2011)
#3Without Spotify and (to a lesser extent) piracy before it, I wouldn’t be listening to 1/10th of the artists I listen to. Maybe it’s just moral cope but I can’t see how it can be made any better for niche or up and coming independent artists.
And what good does that do those artists precisely?
From the article: “For example, I am paid $0.00029 per stream of a song on Spotify, and even this amount depends on whether the song is being streamed by a paid user or someone using the service for free. This means it will take upwards of 3,500 streams of a single song on Spotify to earn $1.00 versus that same revenue for one iTunes song purchase (not to mention the fact that Spotify refuses to pay the same amount to independent artists as they pay major labels, unlike iTunes). ”
Re: As a musician, I prefer illegal downloading over Spotify (2011)
#4Without Spotify and (to a lesser extent) piracy before it, I wouldn’t be listening to 1/10th of the artists I listen to. Maybe it’s just moral cope but I can’t see how it can be made any better for niche or up and coming independent artists.
It could be made better if they were paid more for the enjoyment you get.
Re: As a musician, I prefer illegal downloading over Spotify (2011)
#5The post's actual title is "Giving it Away: How Free Music Makes More Than Sense" and is far more interesting than the part about preferring illegal downloading. The author, Derek Webb, gave (gives?) away albums in exchange for your ZIP Code and email address because the chance of getting you out to a live show was worth more than what he made on a digital sale or stream.
But for context, the full quote about preferring illegal downloading is: "I’ll go even further to say that I actually prefer illegal downloading over Spotify because when you get music illegally it’s at least implicit in the transaction that what you’re doing is potentially harmful to the artist. But with Spotify, your conscience is clear because you’re either enduring ads or paying to use the service and access the music."
Re: As a musician, I prefer illegal downloading over Spotify (2011)
#6I saw in a YouTube video once, and I'll paraphrase because I forgot, something that resonated well with me about piracy.
They said piracy is never about cost, but almost always about a service issue. Basically people flocked to Napster (and the likes) at the time because it let them browse an infinitude of music which was, back then, incredible.
That was just market demand validation, a latent problem waiting for a solution to address it. Piracy just did it first. Once someone solved it, a little bit better, like Spotify did with realtime (instead of p2p waiting), and with indexing/filtering/curation/etc. It automatically won over piracy.
Then, the one fun argument it brought after, is that the same tools that ended piracy are likely the ones making it rise again. Netflix made everyone happy, but now we have a subscription circus. There's N streaming services, and keeping up with subscribing/cancelling/finding the one that has your content created a ... service problem!
So we're bound to see piracy rise again, not because folks don't want to pay $20/mo for streaming, but because they don't want to deal with the hassle of jumping across N subscriptions and keeping track of that.
I think some of the big media is trying to solve for that, which is why you see all of them now becoming "channels" inside each other, but I'm curious to see how this will evolve.
Re: As a musician, I prefer illegal downloading over Spotify (2011)
#7as a guitarer * with a realy cheap phone running butchered android and "side loaded" everything, and zero accounts for anything other than web space, the whole web looks like it's part of my file system as a default, some of it works, most does not , and some tiny fraction of all that is now local.
people send me links and files all the time, again most does not work, and I have to specify, I can open old school pdf's, jpegs, and whatnot, but spotify!, ha!, nope, just tried,it just goes into a fit trying and failing to load who knows what, I could probably spend a day or two, three and build a hinky work around, but then it would fail, so I will stick to what works
* edit: I called myself a musician, but thats not quite true.
Re: As a musician, I prefer illegal downloading over Spotify (2011)
#8Can't get to the noisetrade website. 502 and appears to be using a private certificate.
Re: As a musician, I prefer illegal downloading over Spotify (2011)
#9Without Spotify and (to a lesser extent) piracy before it, I wouldn’t be listening to 1/10th of the artists I listen to. Maybe it’s just moral cope but I can’t see how it can be made any better for niche or up and coming independent artists.
And what good does that do those artists precisely? From the article: “For example, I am paid $0.00029 per stream of a song on Spotify, and even this amount depends on whether the song is being streamed by a paid user or someone using the service for free. This means it will take upwards of 3,500 streams of a single song on Spotify to earn $1.00 versus that same revenue for one iTunes song purchase (not to mention th…
Spotify popularity doesn’t bring in cash directly, but it leads to increased ticket sales for live shows. And Spotify will recommend you to new listeners in a way that piracy won’t.
I have a personal example: Spotify recommended a band to me that I’ve now seen live three times, and they’re so obscure that I never would have heard of them without it. None of my friends knew them either.
Re: As a musician, I prefer illegal downloading over Spotify (2011)
#10Without Spotify and (to a lesser extent) piracy before it, I wouldn’t be listening to 1/10th of the artists I listen to. Maybe it’s just moral cope but I can’t see how it can be made any better for niche or up and coming independent artists.
And what good does that do those artists precisely? From the article: “For example, I am paid $0.00029 per stream of a song on Spotify, and even this amount depends on whether the song is being streamed by a paid user or someone using the service for free. This means it will take upwards of 3,500 streams of a single song on Spotify to earn $1.00 versus that same revenue for one iTunes song purchase (not to mention th…
Wow, those numbers are quite telling.
If you consider that paying for Spotify premium is basically the equivalent of buying one album per month, and the top 12 artists I might be listening to are getting nowhere near 3,500 streams per month from me, it would be better for the artists if I used free Spotify for discovery (like the radio) and then used the money to purchase those favorite albums/songs (that I could then own).
Great food for thought.